I did a search in the larger category. My search for "tires" turned up 5M results. Last week that number returned 22M results. "Music" only returns 129M results. My memory may be a little faded, but last week it was in the 6-800M range. The way I see it, Google is basically reducing the pages indexed by ~80%. The Google Blog was consulted, but there was no mention of a rollout there, or anywhere else.

I am on the east coast, so they may just be doing some server testing in my area. If this is true though, and Google has rolled this algo out to all their data centers, then it has really huge implications for us as SEOs.

If Google is taking away, does this mean that they are more focused on in-depth search? What are they adding? Kimber had stated that she had seen PR3 sites that included site links. Could Google be implementing the Ask strategy as a way to improve search? We've already seen YouTube thumbs and pics start to appear in the SERPs. What next?

The newest PageRank update is conspicuous in all of this. Maybe this is just Google clearing out old pages in the index, or without a certain PR. While I welcome Google clearing out the junk, I have to wonder what new challenges this will bring for all of us.

At any rate, SEOmoz will be here to help us weather any changes. Maybe Rand could get a little time with Mr. Cutts and ask him a kind question 'bout all this.

There has been a change - but I don't know what it is yet. I'm not sure its less - maybe just different. I don't think sites are being deindexed or the index is being rolled back or anything.

How do I know?

Years ago I neglected to register the domain name vingold.com - even though I've had this nick since like 1994 or something.

So, a few months back I went on kind of a frenzy to get my own website to rank higher than vingold.com - meaning lots of vingold anchor text.

For the longest time I was at #2 - even though at one time I had around 50% more links. Then for like 3 days last week, I ranked #1 - and they were number two (all of this is on Google).

I was out in Denver on the weekend and did my little vingold ego check - and not only was vingold.com not #1 - they weren't anywhere in the top 100 of the SERPs. So I checked to see if they were still indexed - and they were.

When I checked the serps back in Maryland - the same thing - vingold.com is no longer being returned for the search term vingold.

Something is afoot. Less emphasis on keywords in domain names perhaps?

And of course now that I am checking this again I see SEOMoz is now #1 for vingold - I guess I asked for that. Plus my site is currently down because of some bad timing on my part in switching and uploading to hosts and stuff - thank goodness I don't actually use it to make any kind of money. Oh well, gives me something to work on.

It's possible that Google is improving the accuracy of their counts; those search results totals, especially the big numbers, have always been an estimate, and various people have questioned their accuracy at times.

Anecdotally, I'm actually seeing the number of indexed pages on multiple client sites increase, even though, in one particular case, I've been making robots.txt, etc. more aggressive to cut the count down (because of content duplications issues).

This post was actually written two days ago...I think Rebecca allows 3 posts max per day on YouMoz.

Numbers have changed back on my search terms earlier this morning.

However, I do think we are seeing a big tweak in the algo that they are using...some sites that would naturally come up for my terms were 30 SERP's behind before this last tweak.

Now they rank slightly ahead of us on the front page.

A site that was top 4 and written in Old Skool HTML (no CSS) dropped completely out of sight. I'm wondering if Google is favoring CSS as a "newer" standard, and thus feels if you have not updated your code to that standard, then you must not be relevant.

We've moved up in the rankings by a position or 2.

I'd like to think that is because of my increased efforts...but..umm...you can't really ever be sure..can you..

It's definitely hard to ignore everything that's going on; it certainly seems like something big is in the works. I've been slightly annoyed because a competitor who engages in exactly the kind of link-building that Google supposedly punished with the last rank-shuffle has actually gained SERP position.

Of course, we all get a little touchy when the numbers change in a way that's bad for us.

If Google are dropping domain names with respect to relevance that's got to be a good thing (for those producing decent content) and a bad thing for those who simply happen to own cool domain names and have been getting traffic without having to produce anything.